


Now I know what the traffic lights mean

by sarahcakes613



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Blue Eyes, Eye Color, Green Eyes, M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:27:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25731343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahcakes613/pseuds/sarahcakes613
Summary: Barba starts being able to see colours other than blue, which means at some point in the past 24 hours, he met his blue-eyed soulmate.Bingo fill for "Can only see in shades of soulmate's eyes until you meet".
Relationships: Rafael Barba/Dominick "Sonny" Carisi Jr.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 83
Collections: Barisi Soulmate Bingo





	Now I know what the traffic lights mean

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to have fun with this one, because I saw two viable interpretations of the prompt and couldn't decide which one to go with. Even in this world, Rafael's a bit unusual!
> 
> I think I've eaten a Twix bar once in my life (I'm so sorry Tris) so I might not have accurately depicted what it tastes like whoops.

Olivia looks at her phone and then at Barba, who is standing under an awning frowning up at the sky. He’d left the squad room twenty minutes ago and she’s surprised to see he hasn’t gotten further than the front door of the 16th precinct.

“Barba, what are you still doing here?”

He gestures at the rain that seems to be pouring from every direction at once.

“I walked here, but the weather appears to have turned on me, so now I’m waiting for – “ he checks his Lyft app. “Jagmeet in a four-door Hyundai to come pick me up.”

“Next time just come back in and take my keys; you can borrow my car.” She jangles her keys at him like he’s an infant she’s trying to amuse.

Rafael smiles but shakes his head.

“I appreciate it, but I don’t actually drive. Or rather, I can’t. Stoplights, you know.”

Olivia nods slowly, but she’s still confused.

“Have you never been fitted with colour-correcting lenses?”

Colour-correcting lenses were invented shortly after the invention of the electric stoplight, to accommodate drivers who hadn’t yet met their soulmate. The concept is fairly simple, you go to your optometrist and tell them what colour you see, and they fit you with a pair of lenses that will correct the connection your brain makes to the specific pattern of lights that make up red, green, and yellow stoplights. It means no matter what colour you see the rest of the world; you’ll still know when to slam on the brakes.

Rafael looks at her. “I thought you knew? I don’t see everything in shades of my soul colour. It’s a genetic anomaly, only about half of one-percent of the population has it, but they’ve never been able to successfully replicate the lens formula to accommodate it.”

“So, what do you see then?” Liv is curious, she’s never met someone who doesn’t see everything in their soul colour.

“I see things that really are shades of blue,” Rafael shrugs. “And everything else is greyscale.”

His ride pulls up then, and he waves at her as he runs for the door, briefcase over his head.

As the car pulls away, Rafael frowns at his phone. He doesn’t like being reminded of the genetic quirk he shares with so few others. He’s only ever met two others like him in his forty years.

He thanks his driver when they get to the courthouse, and his brain doesn’t register that the man’s turban is a vivid indigo colour until he’s already seated in his office. He blinks at his reflection in his open laptop.

Indigo, that’s new. It’s close enough to blue that it could be a fluke, but he needs to be sure. He presses the intercom button on his phone.

“Carmen, do you have any purple highlighters?”

There’s a pause before his secretary replies.

“Sorry, did you say purple?”

“Yes, purple. Indigo, mauve, lilac, anything like that.”

Another pause, and then a knock on his door before Carmen walks in holding two markers.

“These are both purple?” Rafael confirms.

Carmen nods, she met her soulmate in high school and has been a true godsend for Rafael, who can’t colour-code his way out of a filing cabinet.

He flips open a memo pad and then takes the markers from her, eyes closed. Uncapping the markers, he scribbles his signature twice and then he opens one eye, peeking down at the paper.

He opens both eyes, looking more carefully at his scrawled name, and then he looks up at Carmen, his eyes wide in shock.

“I think I’ve met my soulmate.”

It’s a slow process, he knows it’s likely he’ll still only see colours adjacent to his soul colour to begin with. The process will be slower or lengthier depending on how much time Rafael had spent in proximity to his soulmate, and he begins compiling a list of everyone new he has come into contact with.

He can rule out Jagmeet the Lyft driver, rideshare and taxi companies are limited by law to only hiring drivers with confirmed colour-spectrum vision, which means he’s already met his soulmate.

There was a new trainee at the café/bakery near his house this morning, and she’d been very sweet but she’d also been about eighteen and god Rafael hopes it’s not her. He’ll stop in again tomorrow morning, just to be sure.

Rafael doesn’t know if it’s a positive or a negative that his life has become so routine that there are so few new people in his daily interactions. He hadn’t been in court today, which meant no new witnesses, jurors, or family members, nobody he shook hands with and then promptly forgot.

The only other person he can think of is SVU’s new detective, something or other Carisi. He’d only sort of been listening when Liv introduced him, his mind focused on the case at hand.

He dismisses Carmen, thanking her, and tries to return his focus to his work. He can stop by the precinct tomorrow. He’ll pick something up from the bakery, and hopefully he will be able to say it’s to celebrate not being matched to a girl he’s old enough to have fathered.

By the time he calls it a night, he’s managed to put most thoughts of colour out his mind, and when he gets home he collapses into his bed, too tired to think about anything beyond sleep.

When he wakes up the next morning, however, he goes immediately to his closet and begins carefully perusing his shirts and ties. Most of them are still just shades of grey, but he has a pale lilac shirt that he quite likes, and he finds a better appreciation for his paisley suspenders now that they are blue and purple, not blue and washed out grey.

He’s thumbing through his ties when his brain registers a striped tie in blue and teal. It’s always just looked like blue and lighter blue, but now he sees the subtle green tinge to the teal stripes. Dropping it, he rushes to the bathroom and leans in to look at himself in the mirror.

His abuelita had tried more than once to describe the colour of his own eyes to him, but words had always failed her without anything to give Rafael context. Looking at his eyes now, he sees they are a vivid light green, and he thinks about the words she used to use. Are his eyes really the green of her jade bracelet? Is this the colour she used to see when she picked green tomatoes?

In her honour, he pairs a green and grey checkered tie with a light green shirt.

His first stop is the bakery, where he gets a steaming hot cappuccino, a dozen assorted pastries, and a huge sigh of relief when the trainee doesn’t bat an eye at his colourful outfit, or give any other indication that she even recognizes him.

When he gets to the precinct, Detective Carisi is sitting on the edge of his desk talking to Amaro. He’s gesticulating wildly and pointing at his face, and Amaro is laughing. Carisi is wearing a bright blue shirt and his tie is blue with small yellow flowers. Rafael doesn’t remember what he was wearing the previous day, so he couldn’t accurately say if this looks like something he wears normally, or if this is the outfit of a man who has only just discovered what colour his own eyes are.

He approaches them, a cautious smile on his face, holding the bag out for Amaro to take. Amaro’s eyes are twinkling, which is never a good sign.

“Hey, Barba! You met the new guy yesterday, right?”

“Yes, but only briefly. It’s nice to see you again, Detective Carisi.” Barba nods at him, and the taller man beams.

“Please, call me Sonny, everybody does.”

Amaro coughs, but Rafael can hear him mumble “nobody does”. He smirks, but the smirk drops and his expression turns wary when Amaro turns his focus to Rafael.

“That’s a snazzy look you’re pulling today, counsellor. I don’t think I’ve seen you wear a lot of green before.”

He says it pointedly, like he is trying to call attention to Barba’s colour choice.

“What do you think, Carisi?” Amaro prods, “Look at how his shirt matches his eyes.”

Rafael holds his breath, but the new squad member just squints at Amaro.

“I think you gotta big mouth, is what I think.” Carisi huffs at him and then stomps away in the direction of the locker room.

“ _¿Qué fue eso?_ “ Barba hisses at Amaro.

Amaro just smirks at him as he rummages through the paper bag of pastries. “What do you mean, what was that? I just think it’s interesting, you coming in here with a green shirt, Carisi coming in with a blue shirt. He couldn’t see blue, yesterday, and today he comes in and tells me all excited like about how he can see the colours on his blue and yellow tie. You know what colour is smack between blue and yellow, counsellor?” Amaro tilts his chin at Barba’s shirt. 

Barba rolls his eyes. “Well done Amaro, you’re an ace investigator. So what, Carisi met his soulmate. Good for him.”

“Mhm,” Amaro says through a mouthful of almond croissant. “You don’t think it’s a coincidence that he can suddenly see blue – the colour of his own eyes, incidentally, and now here you are, wearin’ a shirt that matches your eyes, which you wouldn’t have been able to do yesterday?” He punctuates his assessment with a gesture of his pastry.

“What I think, detective, is that you need to keep your nose out of other people’s business. Go wave your crumbs at someone else.” He sniffs, and brushes a single stray bit of flaky pastry off his coat lapel.

Amaro just laughs, but walks off in the direction of his lieutenant’s office, paper bag in hand.

Rafael takes a moment to smooth out his tie and swig the last of his cappuccino before he walks over to the locker room. He finds Carisi standing in front of the vending machines, back to the door. Carisi turns when he hears the door open.

He’s holding a chocolate bar in one hand, the wrapper is golden yellow and – oh, Rafael can see yellow now. The rest of the packaging is still mostly grey, but he’s not sure if it’s truth or the power of suggestion that is giving the label a glow, like if he stares at it long enough, it’s real colour will emerge.

“You want one?” The detective asks, ripping the foil wrapper open.

“What is it?” Rafael asks. His abuelita had liked Milky Way bars, and that’s still the only one he buys when he feels the need for chocolate.

Carisi stares at him, dumbfounded. “You never had a Twix before?”

Rafael shrugs.

“Oh man, here, you’re gonna love it.” He holds the package open towards Barba, who gingerly takes one of the chocolate sticks and bites into it.

He lets the biscuit sit in his mouth, the chocolate and caramel layers melting and coating his tongue with a cloying sweetness. It’s not his favourite taste sensation, but the hopeful look in Carisi’s eyes prevent him from doing anything other than smiling and finishing the piece of chocolate.

“I’ve loved these since I was a kid, y’know.” Carisi’s voice is wistful. “I always loved their whole shtick with the commercials, where the one lady thinks the wrapper is brown but then the other guy thinks it’s blue, and they argue until they share it and wham! They can see the real colours. I always thought it’d be nice to have someone to share it with.”

The caramel is now sticking in Rafael’s throat, and he swallows to try and clear it.

“That sounds…nice.” He says, and even as he says it he realizes how inane it sounds.

Carisi doesn’t reply though, his focus on the wrapper in his hand.

“Hey counsellor?”

“Mm?”

“Your soul colour…it’s blue, isn’t it?”

“Yes, why?”

“So, orange’s gonna be the last one you see.” Carisi lifts his gaze. “Mine’s green, which means…” He holds the wrapper up, and it wasn’t the power of suggestion, Barba can now see the name of the candy bar shining at him in bright red lettering.

“I couldn’t see red a few minutes ago.” Carisi says. “And then I shared my Twix with you, and now I can see red.”

“Detective, I’m – that is to say.” Only Rafael doesn’t actually know what he wants to say. The first thing that pops into his head is the slightly hysterics-inducing thought that now Olivia’s probably going to tell him to get his driver’s license.

“Hey, look, I’m not – I mean I get it, you think I wanted to get two days into my fourth borough in as many months only to find out now I got a whole other stack of paperwork I’m gonna have to file?”

He’s trying to be light about it, but Rafael can tell that the detective is as nervous about this as he is, and somehow that’s more reassuring than anything else he could say.

“Huh,” Carisi mumbles, and Rafael looks over to see him scrolling through his phone. He turns it to show the ADA a photo of himself with a gaggle of women.

“My sisters.” Carisi explains. “Bella, my younger sister, she’s the only one of us that saw colours before now, so she’s always been in charge of getting us dressed for family photos. It’s weird seeing ‘em all now. I didn’t know Gina had brown hair.”

“I imagine there’s going to be a lot of that,” Rafael murmurs. When Carisi looks at him, he continues, “we’ve both gone…some number of decades, without all of these colours, I think it’s fairly standard for there to be an adjustment period.”

The taller man nods. “Yeah, yeah, definitely. It’s exciting though, yeah? Thinkin’ about all the things out there that we will have a new appreciation for.”

“Like art?” Rafael wonders if the detective enjoys modern art or if he’s more of a traditionalist. Perhaps a first date at the Guggenheim wouldn’t be amiss.

“Well, yeah, but I was actually thinkin’ like, cheese puffs.” Sonny grins. “Those things always leave my fingers coated, but I never knew what colour.”

Cheese puffs. Rafael groans internally. He’s imagining an enjoyable afternoon looking at masterpieces and his soulmate is thinking about processed cheddar snacks.

“But art too, definitely.” Carisi hastens to add, clearly picking up on Rafael’s consternation.

“Maybe we could – “ Rafael starts.

“Yeah?” Carisi is looking at him, those bright eyes staring straight at him and he’s lost in a whirlpool of ocean blue.

“Art.” Rafael coughs. “We could go look at art. Together. After work.”

“Yeah, okay.” Carisi’s smile is small and soft and oh hell there’s a dimple. Rafael wants to kiss it, wants to drop a single light kiss right on the corner of the detectives mouth. Instead, he turns around and promptly runs out of the squad room.

His phone buzzes when he is on the street hailing a cab.

**Unknown Number:** _Nick gave me your number. Now you have mine. I finish work at 6. I can meet you at 1Hogan around 6:30? It’s Sonny, btw._

**Rafael Barba:** _I gathered as much. 6:30 would be fine, yes. I look forward to it._

**Sonny Carisi** : _Me too._ 😉

Rafael looks at the small winky face, and his consternation is back. All this time, that bright yellow, _that’s_ been the colour of the emojis he’s been using?!


End file.
